Belsat video under unprecedented troll attack

2018.02.0607:21

Video attacked by ‘bots’

A video was ‘disliked’ over 24 thousand times in just 2 days — Belsat had seen nothing like this.

A Belsat story, posted on YouTube, attracted the attention not only of the audience, but also of the unknown “rulers of the trolls”. After the story about life in the Russian village was viewed thousands of times, we noticed an atypical activity: within two days, the video had 24 thousand ‘dislikes’, as opposed to 1.8 thousand of ‘likes’.

Rampant India and Algeria

Most of the negative assessments of Russian reality came from … Ukraine. They were followed by Russia and Belarus — an entirely typical audience for the program that showed the video. But further analysis of the statistics showed that there were enough “indignant and dissatisfied” people in India, Thailand, Vietnam, Mexico and Algeria.

‘Dislikes’ statistics

One of the proofs that “dislikes” are not real, but generated by “bots” is the statistics of views in these exotic countries. Thus, the “Indian” users viewed the material 9 times, but they ‘disliked’ it 429 times. The situation with other ‘dissatisfied’ countries looks similar.

Also unusual is how persistently the “viewers” undertook the task of evaluation. With the number of views about 52 thousand, as many as 24 thousand dislikes looks unlikely.

Not enough money for comments

Positive and negative ratings, views on YouTube can be bought – for a small fee, those wishing to surf the Internet are asked to organize the desired result with the help of special programs or with the involvement of real people. Also, dishonest content producers can buy comments.

On the same day, when “bots” attacked the video of “Belsat”, our colleagues from the Russian-language service of “Deutsche Welle” reported an avalanche of “dislikes” under one of their stories about Russia. The geography of the “dissatisfied” user was similar, because it was exotic: Mexico, Morocco, Algeria, Brazil. “Deutsche Welle” received 3,500 “dislikes” under one video.

The Belsat.eu editorial team intends to ask the YouTube service administrators to consider suspicious activity. A large number of negative assessments makes it is impossible, for example, to block the channel, but this figure can do much harm in positioning our video on Google.

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